Evolution of the ArtCenter Archive
Robert Dirig, Interviewed by Elena Diebel
Excerpt from “At Art Center,” Issue 6, January 1974, page 2.
In 1930, ArtCenter College of Design (originally called Art Center School) was founded with the purpose of preparing students for careers in art and design. The school was first located on 7th Street near MacArthur Park from 1930 to 1945, then relocated to 3rd Street in Hancock Park from 1946 to 1975. In 1976, the school moved to the outskirts of Pasadena where the Hillside campus stands today.
This evolution of space steers the memory of ArtCenter to many who have walked its halls in each campus. In parallel, the physical space of the ArtCenter archives has experienced its own evolution beginning 73 years after the school’s inception.
By the early 2000s, an archive of photos, student work, printed materials, and college records began to amass. In 2003, through a Getty Foundation Grant, ArtCenter started the College Archives. Two years later, in 2005, Robert Dirig was hired to steward and continue organizing the growing collection and currently serves as the Director of Archives and Special Collections.
As the school approaches its 100th anniversary, Robert reflects on the history and speculates on the future in conversation with Acid Free editor Elena Diebel. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
A rendering of a proposed new ArtCenter campus designed by Kem Weber, circa 1936. SPEC 2-2003.1.8, part of the Irene Vermeers collection. Photography by Irene Gutterman.
The 3rd Street campus with students lounging on the front lawn, circa 1950. 2004.26.19.
Elena Diebel: Was there a change or a shift in the vision of what the archives was supposed to be, from when it began in 2003 to now?
Robert Dirig: Yeah, it changed. I've been thinking about the evolution of archives all week too. For many years, it kind of continued the way it was set up, but we ended up doing more records management with the college and adding more internal records into the database. We expanded very quickly and this is probably true of any archive that starts off small.
There was a big shift when we got funding to build out this space. The funding was from Melissa and Michael Lora. Melissa Lora is one of our board members, and her brother Jules Bates was an alum ... He attended ArtCenter in the late 1970s. He had a career as a photographer for fashion, music album covers, celebrity portraits, and documenting the punk scene in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. He was also the photo editor for LA Weekly. Many of the completed pieces are credited to Artrouble, which was an art collective he co-founded with David Allen and Phyllis Cohen. Bates tragically died in a motorcycle hit and run in 1982, having a very short, but prolific career. He made some really iconic images like the DEVO album cover and the Oingo Boingo album cover.
The family had been managing his photograph collection for all these years and then reached out to ArtCenter in 2019 and said, “Hey, is this something ArtCenter can help with?”
Left: Album cover for David Hines: Connection Today.
Middle: DEVO guitarist Bob Casale.
Right: Kool and the Gang, 1979.
All Three: Photography by Jules Bates.
We always wanted to start an official Archives and Special Collections department and have a reading room. We had this vision in our head, but we were never able to fulfill it. So when the Lora Family approached us, we explained that we don't really have the storage or viewing space for people to really appreciate this stuff. After sharing our vision with the Lora Family, it worked out. That's why this space is named the Jules Bates Artrouble Center. They deposited their collection with us. In 2019, we officially became the Archives and Special Collections.
[1] Spread of “At Art Center,” Issue 5, November 1972. [2] Spread of “At Art Center, Issue 6, January 1974. [3] Cover of “At Art Center,” Volume 1, Number 6, July 1982. [4] Cover of “At Art Center,” Volume 2, Number 1, October 1982. [5] Cover of “At Art Center,” Volume 2, Number 3, February 1983. [6] Cover of “At Art Center,” Volume 3, Number 1, January 1984. [7] Cover of “At Art Center,” Volume 5, Number 1. June 1986.
Another instance of evolution is the presence of finding aids online and digital collections online. Today, it's just expected that archives will have a presence online.
E.D.: Yes, the idea of widespread digitization and access from across the world.
R.D.: Definitely. Yeah, it's completely changed reference. A lot of the external requests we get are for documentaries or books. We can make it happen online pretty easily. Being able to help someone across the country or the world in a matter of seconds is amazing. There's a tension because we have things online, but then people think everything's online. So it's good, but I think the expectations are so high now, and also for the systems to work, how like maybe Google works or something, which isn't quite the case.
There's still that need, though, for more of that balance of digital versus physical access. Our own ArtCenter catalogs are a good example: The information in there is great and we use it to look up a course description or maybe who taught at a certain year so we can search that so easily now. Because the PDFs have optical character recognition, we can do an easy search to find out who taught what. But if a student is looking for how that catalog was made, and the construction of it, and what kind of paper did they use, and what the binding looks like, then they really need to come in and look in-person.
Edward "Tink" Adams working on a drawing with students gathered around him, 1937. SPEC 2-2003.1.1.
In the last 20-30 years, people have shown more interest in using archives and also wanting to become archivists. There's a need, there's a desire, but that doesn't always translate into funding for positions, as we know. There are a lot of temporary jobs and a lot of grant funded jobs. There's not quite always support that meets the demand. So that's a challenge. As archives evolve, though, there's more awareness about that aspect of it.
E.D.: There's kind of this uncertainty with archivist work, like is the grant gonna continue? Where are you gonna get your funding? It's kind of this invisible stressor that affects archivists in this field a lot.
R.D.: Definitely. Archives rely on these grant funded positions, but it is incredibly precarious and scary because it could be a three-year position or two-month position. Some people might put a silver lining on it and say, “Well, it gives you different experiences from different places,” but that's not really the answer. In archives in particular, it does help to have that consistency with staff and consistency in the way of processing collections. Not just for a limited term. So that's a huge challenge.
E.D.: The work is just more time consuming than most people think it is.
R.D.: Yeah, exactly. And there are ways to speed it up, you know? I mean, certainly the idea of less process, more product, kind of revising the processing procedures to do it quicker and make things more available for people to look at is good. It's super exciting when people want to use the archives and they're aware of it. You want that enthusiasm, especially if you work in an institutional archive like us. You want the campus and the people in other departments to know you exist and to use your collections. It's a good feeling.
Left: Airplane Seating Assignment. George Jergenson sitting in an airplane seat in the mock-up model of an airplane section. 31-RG 31.02-2004.22.3954.
Middle: A balsa wood glider model suspended on a string. Photography by Geoffrey Fulton. SPEC 139-2023.34.123b.
Right: A student at work on a technical illustration. 28-RG 28.02-2004.21.2170.
E.D.: Throughout your time here, have you noticed a change in the way that students, faculty or anyone that comes in interacts with the archives?
R.D.: It has. When we launched the AtoM site, it was a big change to have digital stuff available online. And a lot of alumni found us that way. Google searches will pick up our holdings. So a lot of times alumni find it that way. They're like Googling themselves or their friends ... I mean, our reference numbers have definitely gone up since we started.
E.D.: There's more stuff that you can browse. I know that's a thing with certain reading rooms is you can't browse. So you gotta go and request your stuff and then you go in and then you look at it, but you can't see anything outside of it. I'm just in this room with no windows.
R.D.: Yeah, our book room that we're sitting in now has a glass wall. So if you're in the reading room, you can see the books. Students can browse, which seems like the opposite of what you should do in special collections. Knowing the way our students look at books, sometimes they will know the book they want and a call number, but most of the time, even if they find that book, they're kind of browsing. And that's just the way our students work.
Reading Room in ArtCenter Archives & Special Collections.
Book Room in ArtCenter Archive & Special Collections.
E.D.: ArtCenter had a lot of changes with location over the years. Didn't it start in downtown LA?
R.D.: Yeah, we had two campuses in Los Angeles. The first was on 7th Street in the MacArthur Park area. And that was from 1930 to 1945. And then they moved to Hancock Park on 3rd Street in Los Angeles, which is now a Hebrew academy. And that's known to us as the 3rd Street campus and that was from 1946 to 1975. And that's one a lot of alumni were really fond of. It's very old school, literally, old school. And it's this beautiful building and there was a courtyard where a lot of the students had classes and hung out. There was a lot of opportunity in that building for students from different departments to mingle and meet each other.
Left: Art Center School campus located at 2544 West 7th Street, Los Angeles, circa 1940. 2004.26.1.
Middle: ArtCenter Artifacts, “I’m Old School” Button, OBJ011.
Right: An exterior front view of the 3rd Street campus building with students lounging on the front lawn, 1949. 2004.26.9.
We eventually outgrew that space, and then in the late 60s, they started really thinking we need to move again. They decided on Pasadena and we opened the building there in January 1976.
The south end of Hillside Campus, circa 1976. 2004.26.628. Photography by Laurence Louie.
E.D.: It's unique in the sense the space has been changing and you have your own journey as an archive space from that room in Hillside to another room in South Campus and then this space. It's expanding, but at the same time, we're always running out of space.
R.D.: And they're very different spaces. All of our buildings have a different vibe, though it's all ArtCenter. It is a challenge to archive that experience. We have photographs and documentation of when we were there, but ultimately, that's not really the experience people have. I suppose you could get it through oral histories. But it's a more difficult thing to capture. The essence of a time and place.
We're trying to do that a bit right now with the Hillside campus because it's the 50th anniversary. One of our requests was “What are things that have happened in that building over the years.” And you look through photos we have and it's almost like it doesn't do it justice. Like, there was this thing here where they had this party or there's really cool things like Keith Haring painting the mural, that was big.
E.D.: It reminds me of the San Francisco Fine Art Institute, which closed down in 2022. But their archive still exists. Becky Alexander, one of the archivists there, talked about newspaper clippings of the school ghost. Some people had witnessed the ghost at this party in 1973 or something like that. But it's just so cool to have those little clippings of this ghost. And then there was a correspondence, and a professor said to make sure to mention the ghost or something like that. Things like that are just so interesting - like, Oh Yeah, that ghost lived in that building on that floor, you know?
R.D.: I love that. Yeah, preserving that lore, those stories. For us, every school claims to have a tunnel. Fun, anecdotal stories are carried down from one like generation to another.
E.D.: Do you see archives as revolutionary in any way?
R.D.: Two things are popping into my head—first, the aspect of community archives. Which didn't exist as much years and years ago and really archiving different voices and communities, and that really captures things that weren't necessarily archived formally, maybe by a big institution or something. I don't know if that's revolution, but it does show more personal voices in a community that for many years were not preserved.
Second, as far as the institutional context, things that go on at an institution like protests. It’s important to collect materials that are historically important, to see how institutions and communities change, and that includes the successes and the challenges. And the student experience is definitely part of it. Sometimes these are records that are not officially part of the records retention schedule. We've dealt with that a couple times. There were student protests quite a few years ago with petitions and there was all this stuff going on around campus. But when that happens on campus, what do you archive? With everything we collect, I always try to think ahead 10-20 years and beyond and imagine what will be important and interesting.
E.D.: You have to take yourself out of the situation. The decisions of what to archive, especially if it's socially charged.
R.D.: And every institution's gonna be a little different in how it approaches that, but I think that's fascinating. It's the history. Ultimately, we're trying to capture what happened in different moments - the history of an institution - and that includes everything.
Images courtesy ArtCenter Archives & Special Collections.
Robert (Bob) Dirig is the Director of Archives and Special Collections at ArtCenter College of Design and has been with the college archives since 2005. He has written on issues regarding digital accessibility in archives and special collections, and inclusive and participatory design.
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